Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Mussorgsky: Khovanshchina

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Although Modest Mussorgsky lived only until 1881, he is really a twentieth-century composer. The so-called "barbaric" dissonances in some of the chords he employed in his music anticipate the dissonant sounds of composers of half a century later like Bartok. Mussorgsky's operas had to wait until the twentieth century to be properly appreciated. He left only one complete opera, Boris Godunov (1874) at the time of his death.

Among several others left incomplete was Khovanshchina, a grand historical panorama of his homeland. The official premiere of Khovanshchina took place in 1911 in a version pieced together by Rimsky-Korsakov, who also edited Boris. The Met waited until 1950 to stage "The Khovansky Affair." The forced modernization of Muscovy is the theme of the opera. The Old Believers refused to accept even the most modest of reforms in Russian Orthodoxy. These religious fanatics got the backing of a faction of the Russian nobility, but all reactionaries were swept aside when Tsar Peter The Great came to power. Mass suicide closed this chapter in Russia's tragic history.

Way back on Sunday, January 26, 1985 I broadcast Khovanshchina in an old Angel LP release derived from the Soviet-era Melodiya record label, featuring the musical resources of Moscow's famed Bolshoi Theatre. The opera in its present form was edited by the eminent Russian musicologist, Pavel Lamm. Orchestration by Dmitri Shostakovich restored those colorful dissonances, but purged from the opera's score is additional music composed by Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel, and Stravinsky. The entire opera was recorded uncut in 1991 with a native Russian cast and the chorus and orchestra of the Kirov Theatre of St. Petersburg, Valery Gergiev conducting. I last broadcast this Philips CD release on Sunday, January 13, 2002.